1. Know Your Numbers and Your Goals

Before your first conversation with the SEO team or consultant, you need to know your top-level numbers and goals for this project.

These are the most common and helpful questions to answer for the SEO team:

Why are you relaunching the website?

Common reasons are branding, company name change, websites merging, brand consolidation, redesign, replatforming, among others.

What percent of website traffic currently comes from organic search?

This impacts the preparation phase and the depth of an initial SEO audit

What do you hope to accomplish organically with this project?

Some teams want to minimize traffic loss

Some are hoping for a traffic boost (not always realistic)

Some are ok with losing traffic on some properties, but need to protect others

Knowing your numbers and goals helps the SEO get a picture of how critical the project is for your site. If your site only gets 5% of traffic from search, that’s a lot different from a site getting 90% of traffic from search, and will impact recommendations and planning.

2. Define Top Priority Goals for the Site

With more teams and people come more opinions.

What often happens with website relaunches and redesigns is that the designers have one opinion, the UX team another, the development team a third, and on and on for marketing, content, SEO, PPC, CRO, etc.

Is your relaunch’s #1 goal to make a prettier site? A faster site? A site that earns more organic traffic? There are multiple goals but they should be clearly prioritized.

When you as a marketing manager have to make a decision when SEO and design are on opposite sides of the table, which goal do you prioritize?

3. SEO Relaunches are an Art and a Science

There’s a lot of technical SEO elements that are part of a website relaunch.

Redirects, canonicals, sitemaps, the list goes on.

There are some critical elements that are part of any SEO relaunch project that can cripple your site. There are also dozens of nuances that are small on their own, but add up to be significant.

The science part is ensuring all the technical SEO aspects are perfectly aligned.

Then comes the art part. If you’re making content changes during a relaunch, it’ll take some human decision making to decide what stays, what goes, what merges, and what gets prioritized (backed by data of course).

Likewise, when changing the architecture of your site, there are best practices to a degree, but also your own perception on what makes sense and what doesn’t.

4. A Lot Can Go Wrong

As shown in the recent post on SEO relaunch case studies, seemingly minor things can make your site sink like a rock post-launch.

Just one misconfiguration of one critical element – such as the robots.txt, noindex tags, or rel=canonical elements – can tank your site for weeks until detected.

It’s unfair.

It shouldn’t be the case that so much can go wrong in organic search from so little, but it’s the way things are.

Sometimes Google will give you the benefit of the doubt, or ignore some directives, but some are absolute.

A good way to value how much this project is worth to you is to multiple the revenue from organic traffic for anywhere from 9 days to 6 weeks by 30%. The resulting number is a good ballpark figure for how much you could lose from a failed project. I put together a quick lost revenue calculator here to see for yourself.

5. Preparation is Everything

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” – Benjamin Franklin

Good ole’ Ben said it best, hundreds of years before the first website.

With so many teams, ideas, and tasks happening at the same time, preparation is everything.

Look, with such a big project, a lot is on the line.

It’s a lot more than “lining up redirects and making sure the content stays the same” as some people might flippantly reply on Twitter.

So get out those spreadsheets, those Asana boards, those checklists, and strap in for a fun ride!

6. Create a General Timeline Based on Needs

Having a timeline is critical.

The SEO team should be engaged 30-60 days out for small sites, and 6 months to a year out for large sites.

As with many website development and digital marketing projects, things get moved all the time because the nature of the project is so ethereal. We’re not building cathedrals here. Just digital ones.

If your timeline is for a 4-month project and it gets delayed repeatedly throughout the process, your SEO team may be unavailable or have to charge more for the extra delays, so make the plan as concrete as possible, and based on real needs.

7. Share Everything Between Teams

It can be annoying to loop in all the teams on email in every conversation, but with task management systems like Asana or communication platforms like Slack, your teams can have visibility in what the others are discussing.

This is pretty powerful.

As one example, my SEO team only got wind of a product page redesign that UX and design had agreed upon weeks after it was decided. But they left out key modules on the page that would impact SEO. They had to make design adjustments, which delayed the project an extra week.

Like everything in business and life, communicate early and often.

8. Involve Teams as Early as Possible

Similar to above, it’s key to involve all the critical teams as early as possible in the project.

If a large site is relaunching in two weeks, that’s not the time to invite the SEO team to review the project before launch.

That’s asking for disaster.

A lot of projects overlap between teams, and there are tons of dependencies. Make sure that everyone knows what’s happening if it even remotely affects their work.

It’s likely everyone involved is also working on their standard monthly projects in addition to this one-time project. So make sure everyone has enough time to prepare, and it’ll be happily ever after.

9. Share Analytics Information Ahead of Time

It’s good to safeguard your company’s private information, such as financial data and proprietary information.

It’s very unlikely that showing your analytics to an SEO before the contract is signed means the SEO will go give it to your competitor and they’ll make millions.

It’s more likely that there are lots of nuances that can’t be seen from 3rd party tools that can affect the whole project.

10. Keep the HiPPOs in the Loop

Are there executives and higher ups (HiPPOs – highest paid person in the office) on the sideline watching the project from afar?

They may only come out of the woodwork after the fact, with opinions when it’s too late.

If your executives are interested in the performance of the website, share updates with them for major changes.

Their opinions can derail the project when it’s too late. You know your internal politics and processes, but from my experience, there have been a few scenarios when the ultimate decision maker (CEO) got involved too late, and the teams had to scrambe.

Bonus: It Ain’t Over till it’s Over

After a website relaunch, you’re allowed to pop the champagne for 5 minutes before it’s time to get back to work.

The 2nd most important portion, besides the preparation phase, is the post-launch phase where we’re monitoring the traffic in real time.

Google search is a black box. All of our best practices are based on thousands of SEOs testing what works and what doesn’t. But there’s still so much that’s unknown.

What may work for one site perfectly may not for another.

So after a site launches it’s critical to be flexible and make the adjustments needed based on how organic rankings and traffic are flowing.

Once you start hitting some growth after a few months post-launch, then you can celebrate.